In a course I taught last spring, after three months of tracing the development of literary theory from humanism to structuralism to poststructuralism to the dilemmas of the present, I finally asked my students the question: “So, why do you want to study literature, knowing what you now know?” I wondered if studying a century of cynicism had altered their motives in the slightest. They were all considering graduate school, but their answers had little to do with what I knew they would need to write in their application essays…It surprised me that none of my students mentioned a commitment to social justice or to some specific political ideology as a motive. Nearly all of them would have skewed to the left on most of the usual subjects. When I asked about that, one said, “If I wanted to be a politician, I’d major in political science. If I wanted to be a social worker, I’d major in sociology.”

Well exactly. Exactly. How terribly odd it is that Thomas H Benton (presumably not that Thomas H Benton, nor that one either) is surprised that none of his students mentioned a commitment to social justice or to some specific political ideology as a motive for studying literature. Why would they? Why on earth would they? What is the connection? Why, on earth, would someone who is fired up with a commitment to social justice or to a political ideology sit down with a beer and a dish of cashews to ponder what kind of advanced degree to get, and come up with – literature? Literature? Why that? Why not opera, or interior design, or mincing and prancing? Those make just as much sense. That is what I always wonder about these bizarro world people who orate about their concern with social justice instead of actually saying anything about literature despite the inconvenient fact that they are, in truth, teachers of literature. Did they take a wrong turn in the corridor and simply keep going until they had the wrong PhD and it was too late? Why don’t they have exactly the same limpid thought the student offered Benton? If they want to do politics, why don’t they get their degrees in political science instead of literature? Why are they so…lost?

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11 Responses to “Didja Drop Your Compass?”

I don’t have any real answers to your very good questions, but I might suggest that at some point the view became widespread that literature, as literature, just wasn’t a serious enough subject to waste the time and effort to get an advanced degree about. All the serious people were on the barricades, or at least the picket lines, fighting for peace and justice, so of course literature students had to do the same in order to justify their existence to their peers.

Also, in France (the center of the universe in lit crit circles), writers like Sartre and Camus were intensely political, so of course a serious literature student had to be also.

Oddly enough, one of the benefits of attending UC Irvine (that’s Derrida Central, y’all) as an undergrad was that I wasn’t expected to “talk politics” at all–it was all about, like, language and stuff like that.

I thought the interesting part of the article was the THB basically agreed with the students that the ‘political’ side of it was irrelevant — he is recognising the absurdity of the need to claim political justification.

I’m not sure it’s that surprising. After all, for about 100 years from the end of the 18th century it was accepted that there was a connection between literature and political and social change. Shelley’s ‘unacknowledged legislators’ etc. And pre 17th century you could, perhaps, argue that ‘literature’, with the exeception of poetry, didn’t exist as a genre – all writing was social or political in some way.

A bit sweeping I know, but I think one could argue that it is the detachment of literature from social and political commitment that is the aberration.

Well, heck, of course he does. The alternative is sounding like David Horowitz [sp?] Re. Chris Whiley, I didn’t think literature was so detached — Martin Amis, Jeanette Winterson, Maya Angelou et al would not think so. The trouble is that, unlike 200 years ago, we have a democratic sphere in which people’s crude material interests are allowed to predominate in political decision-making — thus over-ruling, largely for ill, the ability of ‘culture’ to speak to political problems.

Anyway, it’s never been universally accepted that there’s a connection between literature and political and social change. That’s been one view but there have certainly been plenty of 1. explicit opponents of that view and 2. literary writers who ignore it in practice.

And “he is recognising the absurdity of the need to claim political justification” – in most of the article, but the way he phrased that particular comment seems to assume it. “It surprised me that none of my students mentioned a commitment to social justice or to some specific political ideology as a motive.” Maybe he just means he’s surprised they hadn’t picked that idea up via undergraduate courses – but it doesn’t quite sound like that.

“the pseudonym of an associate professor of English”

Oh, that’s right. I’ve noticed that pseudonym at the CHE before – I forgot.

Before Sartre and his “littérature engagée” Joseph Stalin promoted writers as the “engineers of the human soul,” and Mao promoted literature as a political tool, saying, ‘Lenin pointed out emphatically that our literature and art should “serve . . . the millions and tens of millions of working people”‘.